Showing blog posts by Celeste Drake

About Celeste Drake

I’m a Trade & Globalization Policy Specialist at the AFL-CIO, which I tell my friends at home means that I do two main things: 1) try to improve U.S. trade policy so it doesn’t send more jobs overseas, and 2) try to improve labor rights for workers overseas so that workers globally can race to the top instead of having global corporations push us to the bottom. My first experience with the labor movement was as a UFCW member while bagging groceries for six months during college. Full health benefits for everyone who worked at least 16 hours a week? Triple time on holidays? I was sold on unions and never looked back! Since then, I’ve been a public school teacher (and vice president of my local), a law clerk for a federal judge, and congressional aide on Capitol Hill. While Legislative Director for Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), I coordinated the Labor and Working Families Caucus, one of the largest caucuses in the U.S. House of Representatives. I’ve got a BA, a JD, and an MPP from UCLA. Go Bruins!

U.S. workers should beware of promises that the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will create jobs. When evaluating the recent Obama administration claim that the TPP will create 650,000 jobs, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker gave it the lowest possible rating of Four Pinocchios—aka “Whopper.” Fact Checker editor Glenn Kessler wrote (after the jump):

Yesterday, five members of the powerful Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives (Reps. Bill Pascrell, Lloyd Doggett, John Lewis, Linda Sánchez and Jim McDermott) stood up for working people by opposing the destructive “corporate courts” in the proposed trade and economic deal with Europe known as the “TTIP.”

In January 2014, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, responding to the introduction of the latest “Fast Track” legislation, said, “It is past time for the United States to get off the corporate hamster wheel on trade.”

Remember that scene from The Princess Bride where Inigo Montoya tells Vizzini, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

That’s how I feel about Fast Track. It’s a totally undemocratic scheme that allows the Executive Branch to negotiate—in near total secrecy—a “trade” deal that will forever change the rules of our economy, and then send that deal to Congress.

Once again, a World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement panel has issued a decision that leaves American manufacturers—and those who work for them—behind. In two separate decisions just released (Case DS436, concerning carbon steel from India, and Case DS437, concerning solar panels and 16 other products from China), the WTO ruled that the United States had violated its WTO obligations in the manner that it applied countervailing duties on products from the two countries.

The TTIP (the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a proposed trade agreement between the United States and the European Union) is an opportunity to get trade and globalization policy right, say the AFL-CIO and the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), the trade union federations that together represent tens of millions of workers. But this will only happenif the agreement is negotiated in an open manner, ensures that corporations cannot override governments and threaten the public good, promotes workers' rights and social justice and in all other ways puts people before profits.

In early March, the AFL-CIO joined 42 other organizations representing labor, business, public health, environmental concerns, consumers, family farms and good governance as well as three legal scholars in sending a letter calling on the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to match the European Commission’s commitment to holding a public consultation on investment issues, particularly with respect to the pending U.S.-European Union trade negotiations (known as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP).